Around 7,500 tweets mentioning ‘contraception’ or ‘birth control’ were collected during a 24-hour period in November last year. The follow relationships were then worked out between all the accounts that had tweeted.

This approach underlines the ability of network analysis to discover online communities and is reminiscent of Lada Adamic’s network map of links between Republican and Democrat blogs in the run-up to the 2004 election. It suggests US politics has grown no less polarised since then, at least around this issue.

Lada Adamic’s famous visual of Democrat and Republican blogs during the 2004 US election

The image below shows the intersection between the Democrat and Republican communities in more detail.

You can download a PDF of the network showing individual account names here (21 MB).